Sermon in Joensuu Church, Finland
Eucharist, Sunday 7th August, 2005
Readings: Job 42:1-6, Rom 7:14-25, Mt 21:28-32
London is certainly not the centre of civilization, and even if I were a Londoner myself (which I am not), I would not have the impertinence even to suggest this here in Joensuu. But my story this morning does begin there, in two well-publicised but different events.
The first was on Wednesday 6th July; I was in a taxi listening to the radio with the cab-driver waiting for the result of the Olympic nomination. When it came, the whole of London seemed to draw to a halt. Everyone in the streets was jumping up and down with delight. That morning, ‘The Times’, one of our main newspapers, had carried a leading article extolling the merits of Finnish cuisine – no doubt a gentle attempt to draw attention away from the UK, by reminding us all of the French President’s gaffe about British food and your food! But old national rivalries apart, London was rejoicing.
The next day, I was not in London, thank goodness, but sitting at my desk in my house near Portsmouth. Suddenly the phone rang, and it became clear that terrible events had happened on the very ground where people had given thanks twenty-four hours before. Mobile phones relayed messages that relatives and loved ones were all right, but it became clear that there were some travelers who would never return home. The police and emergency services quickly went into action to the places where the bombs had exploded. Where London had been loud with joy the day before, the streets were now silent in defiant disbelief.
Those two events illustrate the two sides to human nature with which every Christian has to deal in some way or another. On the one hand, creativity, in this case motivation for the sport industry, especially for the young, and the rebuilding of a run-down and neglected part of East London that had never really recovered even from the blitz in the Second World War, into an Olympic village; on the other hand, wilful destruction, carefully planned deaths, other casualties, and a transport-system in a world-capital at a total halt. One day the skies seemed to be the limit, only for the whole world to close in the next.
Into that mixed world come this morning’s readings. First, we have Job’s profound confession of faith and penitence before the God whose ways he had the courage to probe when his livelihood had collapsed (Job 42:1-6). Then we have St Paul exhorting the Christians in Rome to see the Jewish Law in all its richness as a spiritual reality, yes, but superseded by Christ himself; they must take this on board, and not discard it, and not give way to an embryonic form of one of the darkest passages of Christian history, anti-semitism (Rom 7:14-25). All this is summed up in a characteristically sharp challenge from Jesus in the Gospel-passage: the two sons who respond to their father’s direction that they work in the vineyard by doing quite different things; and straight after that comes another reversal, the reversal of conventional attitudes, with tax-collectors and other unfashionable, unpopular and ethically-questionable people entering the kingdom of heaven first (Mt 21:28-32).
How do we square up this mixed scene? London in top form one day, and at a vulnerable and tragic stand-still the next: and then these unsettling, bothersome words from scripture with their background in God himself addressing the human condition. It is so much easier to take life as it comes, to philsophise superficially: ‘we must take the rough with the smooth’, as we say in England: I am sure there is a Finnish equivalent. I’m no sportsman, as my friends will tell you, and yet I am still able to recognize the degree of liberation which sport can give, not only to the players but to the spectators. But I also know full well that the world is still a dangerous place, and that with the invention of every new piece of technology, the human race, the fallen human race, has a choice between doing good and doing evil. The press of a computer button means, for example, that organizing the international theological conference between Anglicans and Lutherans which has been taking place here in Joensuu these past few days is much easier than it was for the first of these gatherings in 1929, when communication took much longer. But we still have to realise those same computers can also be used to manipulate, dominate and destroy people’s lives, for example by pressing a button that can bring the voyeur into visual contact with child pornography.
All of which is a powerful argument for demanding from the human race a deeper and more considered view of why we are here than simply shrugging our shoulders and taking life as it comes. If we have minds and hearts with which to reflect on the human condition, then we must use them to probe and question, as Job did, especially when the religious and philosophical ‘Job’s comforters’ failed to go deep and remained on the surface; we must accept, too, along with St Paul, the reality of evil, but the need to struggle with the imperfect, precisely because, as he goes on to say, there is ‘no condemnation’ for those who believe (Rom 8:1); and we also have to own up to our own ambivalence about the gospel, exemplified in those two sons in the story Jesus told, where one didn’t go to work in the vineyard, having said that he would, and the other, having said that he wouldn’t, went ahead and did so nonetheless.
Job only gets as far as confessing God’s greatness, and his own sin, after spending forty chapters arguing with various kinds of people who churned out their own platitudes; don’t, please, question, otherwise there will be trouble, and even if you do, things just are the way they are. Job’s vision of God is deepened by all that questioning. Paul, on the other hand, paints a cartoon of the compulsory sinner, who does not understand his own actions, because the Law, when misunderstood, puts him in a passive place in relation to himself; but Paul knows that the life of faith is far richer, and involves the day-to-day mixture of good and evil, of varying shades of grey competing with one another, and of all impiety and wickedness, the works of the flesh, being under God’s judgement. And when Jesus warns us in the Gospel that some unsavoury characters might just possibly precede us into the kingdom of heaven, we are left looking no longer at them, but at ourselves: to what extent are we truly obedient? Remember, those words were uttered shortly after his entry to Jerusalem, the great capital city of the Jews, when he cleansed the temple (Mt 21:1-13), an action hardly meant to endear him to those with vested interests in everything staying as they were, especially when his first action thereafter was to heal the blind and the lame.
God is on the side of Job, not on the side of his superficial religious experts. God is on the side of Paul, in his heart-felt attempts to get the Christians of Rome to accept one another in all their diversity, and to relate to the faith out of which Christianity was born, and not cast it off alongside those among their community who were being thrown out of the city (another capital, but the imperial one this time!) because they were of Jewish origin. And God is on the side of the heart, not the mouth: the son who had a change of heart and went to the vineyard, rather than the one who changed his mind and didn’t. In each case, it is the superficial, easy option that is discarded: those who want to call a halt to Job’s restless mind who themselves never suffered much; those who want so to misunderstand the moral and spiritual demands of the gospel that they are left to shrug their shoulders at St Paul because nothing really matters any more; and those who want to live by appearances, where what we say counts for rather more than what we do, and who will in turn be truly shocked at the thought of undesirable collaborators being ahead of them in the queue into the kingdom of heaven.
For the majority of people, faith is a real struggle. Yet faith is most easily discarded when it doesn’t both meet and challenge the life we live day by day, whether we are citizens of Joensuu, or participants at this conference from elsewhere in Finland, or from England, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland. For all of us, it can be very tempting to lock God up in the favourite hymns we sing, or the good experiences we have which make us happy or proud, or the worthy intentions we may articulate from time to time, which we know in our heart of hearts have little to do with the people we really are.
And that finally brings me back to London nearly one month ago, to those two sides of the human race so vividly illustrated by those very different scenarios: the spontaneous burst of joy, followed by the tragic, premeditated bomb-explosions that did so much harm. Both these events have spiritual realities. Human joy is, admittedly, partial; but there can be no terrorism, no violence, no compulsion of any kind, in the life of faith. For as Martin Luther himself remarked long ago, faith alone justifies us. This is because faith, God’s very gift to us, binds us closely to him in his Son Jesus Christ, that the Spirit may live and grow in the lives we lead. And it is just as true when our lives are disturbed by the questions of Job, the inner tensions of Paul’s awkward Roman congregation, or the ambivalences Jesus reveals about us in relation to himself in the Gospel. Here is the arena in which the drama of salvation is played out, a drama of human history, both in its spectacular and less spectacular forms, in its strivings and stumblings, and its goodness and sinfulness. All this, and much more besides, God takes seriously, for his good purposes, which are about turning us once more towards the kingdom of heaven.
Kenneth Stevenson
Bishop of Portsmouth
Chair, Anglo-Nordic-Baltic Theological Conference
